Simon Curtis: After a quarter century, City’s modern journey is threatening to take the scenic route again

Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and others will find this wonderfully medicinal. City, they will say, denied them trophies while taking a night course in the dark arts. Send them down! Fair enough, if guilt is proven. The logistical snag is that – if we are to retreat to old haunts - half the petrified grounds from the infamous 1998–99 season, when City were down with the dead men, are dead themselves, flattened into retail parks, flats and places selling coffee in polystyrene buckets.

City may yet return to Chesterfield, Walsall and Swindon, only with improved parking possibilities. The old bravado will travel too. It powered us through the first tour 25 years ago and should survive the sequel, although this time it may be accompanied by the numb look of people learning that the burgeoning empire they became used to was secured to the earth with Sky-Blu Tack.

The high-end tailored confidence and corporate surefootedness, that brash couldn’t-happen-to-us air of Khaldoon al Mubarak and his pristinely dressed troops now look somewhat threadbare. All that remains for them to survey is a tear-stained charge sheet and a vast, cold echo chamber of catcalls and whistles, as the esteemed Lord Pannick’s eye-watering billable hours drop through the letterbox.

For City fans, the climb from domestic hopefulness to the continental elite has been absurd and magnificent in equal amounts: trophies, glory, sky-blue shirts filing out in Amsterdam and Barcelona, that sudden moistness behind the eyes. After decades watching the Alan Kernaghan shuffle and the Scott Hiley hokey cokey, football’s hard-luck canteen was left behind in a cloud of dust and we were suddenly dining on prime steak upstairs. It carried us so high maybe now we are going back to the basement where the sacks of oats are kept.

Let us not fool ourselves, this is the big one. Football’s prizes are monstrous, its spotlight ceaseless, its governing language biblical. Labyrinthine regulations stretch their tentacles and catch their prize. City are no longer Francis Lee’s little cup for cock-up merchants: no longer losing comically at Birmingham and Stockport, nor exiting the FA Cup at Bramall Lane via a balloon thrown into the box by the club’s own support. Those were the clown-car years. We loved them because we thought they were safely behind us. “We’ve seen things they’ll never see,” said the banner. Indeed. Modern football has enlarged everything: the money, the breaches, the lawyers, the punishments and the hypocrisy. A City fall would no longer be a pratfall. It would be the Titanic lurching, Mount St Helens billowing smoke, the Houston switchboard crackling into sudden drastic life.

City rose with football’s modern upward curve. The 2008 detonation brought Robinho, a Brazilian who thought he was heading for Chelsea and came face to face with Mark Hughes instead. Greatness was being assembled around a takeover that saw Thaksin Shinawatra’s dubious riches replaced by Abu Dhabi’s solid gold. The former Thai prime minister later found himself in court explaining his preferred accounting arrangements. Even then, City were laying rickety foundations through peanut-flavoured smoke. We simply assumed the air would clear on an ascendent staircase.

From cautious outlay on Vincent Kompany and Crag Bellamy, we had entered another universe. The sums involved lay beyond ordinary terrace arithmetic, where a pie and a pint still counted as careful financial planning. In came Agüero, De Bruyne and big Erling. Supporters raised on Ian Brightwell passing sideways towards the Kippax, were suddenly dining on David Silva’s laser-threaded through-balls. Yaya Touré thundered in, Fernandinho blocked and hacked, and Scott Sinclair stood rooted as a reminder of where we had all come from. We may need those directions again.

And perhaps that is the joke at the centre of it all. Football’s summit is advertised as climbable, but the ladder is pulled up nightly and knotted by lawyers. The strong are embedded; everyone else is scenery. Perhaps City’s mistake was believing the heights could be reached by normal means, that they, Villa, Newcastle, Leeds or Everton might enter the gilded enclosure without first reading the smallprint. Maybe it was never a pyramid at all. Maybe it was a penthouse above a cave system, and we are about to fall through the cracks.

City will go wherever the punishment sends them. Laughter and derision will rattle behind the coach on the way out. That old Manchester gallows humour will return intact because, after all the milk, honey and embossed hospitality passes, we are not averse to the taste of simple fare in these parts. Some of us never quite got used to caviar and champagne anyway.

If we must vacate the Tunnel Club buffet, we will, and instead we will embark on another scenic journey to the leaky terraces of Oakwell and the warm welcome that almost certainly awaits.